Listen to this story
Audio reading for accessibility.
Ready to play.
Table of Contents
Duluth Public Schools would like the community to notice that police officers issued only 12 citations to students during the last school year, down from 115 five years earlier. It is an impressive-looking number, particularly for a school district working to rebuild public confidence while asking Duluth voters to approve two operating levy questions in November.
But residents should resist the temptation to applaud before asking the most elementary question of all: Did Duluth schools actually become dramatically safer, or did adults simply become dramatically less likely to cite, suspend and otherwise punish students for misconduct?
Those are not remotely the same thing, and the district has not produced enough evidence to allow the public to treat them as interchangeable.
A police citation is not a measurement of violence. It is not a measurement of fighting, threats, weapons, assaults, bullying, vandalism, injuries, lockdowns, frightened teachers or frightened children. A citation records one decision made after something has already happened: whether an officer chooses to issue a ticket.
Duluth has deliberately changed the way those decisions are made. The district has embraced de-escalation, restorative practices, alternatives to exclusionary discipline and efforts to keep students in school rather than automatically sending them into suspension or the juvenile justice system.
There may be considerable merit in that philosophy. A 14-year-old who gets into a schoolyard fight does not necessarily need a criminal citation to learn that throwing a punch has consequences, and a skilled officer who can calm an explosive confrontation before it becomes worse is performing valuable work.
But if Duluth Public Schools wants credit for improving the way it handles troubled students, it should say exactly that. It should not allow the public to mistake a dramatic reduction in punishment for a dramatic reduction in dangerous behavior unless it can prove that the underlying behavior fell with it.
The district's own statistics provide plenty of reasons to demand that proof.
During the most recent school year, Duluth schools recorded more than 1,000 incidents resulting in in-school or out-of-school suspension. They included 156 fighting incidents, 63 major assaults, 99 physical-contact incidents, 52 threat or intimidation cases, seven terroristic threats and nine weapons incidents. Those numbers do not describe schools where behavioral problems have vanished.
They also make it difficult to square a feel-good narrative about disappearing student citations with the much messier reality occurring inside school buildings.
School resource officers reported hundreds of de-escalations. By April 20, before the school year had even ended, they had recorded 315 de-escalation incidents and 484 situations in which an SRO handled something that otherwise might have required a 911 call or a patrol officer response.
Those are extraordinary numbers to place beside 12 citations.
If nearly 500 situations were serious enough that ordinary patrol officers or 911 might otherwise have been involved, then the public deserves considerably more explanation before being encouraged to interpret 12 citations as evidence that Duluth's schools suddenly became extraordinarily peaceful.
The more plausible conclusion is that the district changed the back end of the system. Students still fight. Students still threaten one another. Officers still intervene. Administrators still suspend children. SROs still defuse volatile situations. What has changed most dramatically is what happens after some of those incidents occur.
That may be progress. It may even be very good progress.
But public institutions should not be allowed to grade their own homework by selecting whichever statistic casts them in the most flattering light.
The comparison with 2021-22 deserves particular scrutiny because it produces the enormous percentage decline that sounds so spectacular today. That year was anything but a normal baseline.
Students were returning to school after historic COVID-era disruptions. Relationships had broken down, routines had disappeared and school administrators openly described extraordinary behavior problems as young people attempted to readjust to normal classroom life.
Denfeld experienced an especially difficult return. Nearly half of the district's 115 citations that year were issued during September and October, when the post-pandemic transition was at its most chaotic.
Then citations collapsed.
They fell from 115 in 2021-22 to 32 the following year. After that they declined to 23, then 22 and finally 12.
That means the greatest improvement occurred immediately after an abnormal year that district officials themselves had described as extraordinarily difficult. Anyone presenting the five-year decline without placing that enormous COVID-era distortion front and center is giving the public an incomplete picture.
A fair comparison would ask something much tougher: What has happened since schools returned to something resembling normal?
From 32 citations in 2022-23 to 12 last year is still a substantial decline. But it is not 90%, and even that decline cannot tell us whether schools became safer unless we also know what happened to fights, assaults, threats, weapons, police calls, injuries and emergency responses.
Duluth Public Schools has the ability to answer those questions.
It should publish five years of fighting incidents at every secondary school. It should publish five years of assaults, weapons incidents, threats, police reports, student and employee injuries, lockdowns, holds and secure-building events.
Duluth police should disclose annual calls for service to Denfeld, East, Lincoln Park Middle School and Ordean East Middle School, regardless of whether officers eventually arrested, cited, warned or simply separated anyone involved.
Those numbers would tell us far more about school safety than the number of tickets left in an officer's citation book.
The district should also publish complete student safety survey results, including the percentage of students who say they feel safe at school. Positive, neutral and negative answers should be presented separately, not bundled into pleasant-sounding categories that make virtually any result look reassuring.
If district leaders believe their schools have become dramatically safer, they should welcome that scrutiny.
They should want Duluth residents to see the evidence.
And if the evidence shows steep reductions in violence, threats, weapons, police calls and injuries, I will happily write that Duluth Public Schools has achieved something remarkable.
But there is another possibility the community should be willing to confront. What if assaults remain substantial? What if fights have declined modestly rather than dramatically? What if police activity remains considerable while citations have nearly disappeared? What if the district has mainly become better at managing serious behavior without sending children into the criminal justice system?
That would still be an important accomplishment.
It simply would not be the same accomplishment.
This distinction becomes even more important because Duluth Public Schools is asking voters for more money on Nov. 3. Question 1 would impose an operating levy with an estimated cost of about $8 per month for the owner of a $300,000 home. Question 2, which depends on passage of the first question, would add another estimated $7 monthly.
The district is making that request while trying to restore public trust following serious financial problems. Under those circumstances, voters deserve more than carefully selected success statistics and institutional self-congratulation.
They deserve receipts.
If school safety has improved, show the numbers.
If discipline has changed, explain exactly how.
If fewer students are being cited because officers are intentionally resolving cases differently, say so plainly.
If serious misconduct remains a significant problem despite fewer citations, taxpayers deserve to know that, too.
Trust is not rebuilt by polishing statistics until they shine. It is rebuilt by releasing the uncomfortable numbers alongside the comfortable ones and allowing citizens to reach their own conclusions.
There is also a larger philosophical issue here that school leaders should address honestly.
Minnesota schools have increasingly moved away from suspensions, expulsions and police citations because policymakers are concerned that those measures can damage young people and disproportionately affect some student groups. Duluth has embraced that philosophy.
Reasonable people can debate whether that approach has gone too far, not far enough or landed exactly where it should. What reasonable people should not debate is the need to measure its consequences honestly.
If a student commits an assault today and receives restorative intervention instead of a citation, the citation count goes down by one.
The assault does not disappear with it.
If an officer breaks up a fight without issuing a ticket, the citation count goes down.
The fight still happened.
If an administrator handles a threat internally instead of requesting criminal charges, the justice-system statistic improves.
The threat still occurred.
That is precisely why the public should be deeply skeptical whenever disciplinary outcomes are presented as evidence of underlying safety.
Duluth residents should hope the district has discovered better ways of dealing with children in trouble. They should hope SROs are preventing confrontations from becoming criminal cases, and they should hope restorative programs are changing lives rather than merely changing spreadsheets.
But hope is not evidence.
Duluth Public Schools has put forward a spectacular statistic: 115 citations became 12.
Now the district should answer the question that statistic cannot answer.
How many dangerous incidents became fewer? Until taxpayers see those numbers, they should resist any suggestion that a nearly 90% decline in police citations means Duluth schools became nearly 90% safer. Maybe the schools really are considerably safer. Maybe the district is simply issuing considerably fewer tickets.
The people paying the bills — and soon being asked to pay considerably more — deserve to know the difference.
